‘YouTube Next’ — Google’s next adventure in online video content

Popular video sharing site, YouTube, announced that it bought internet television company Next New Networks to improve its content. The acquisition of Next New Networks was first reported by the New York Times in December.

Next New Networks, a New York City-based startup launched in 2007 specialises in producing high quality original video content for the web. The network is also home to popular networks, such as “Barely Political” and “Indy Mogul,” which it billed as the “filmmaking network for the YouTube generation.”

YouTube also announced ‘YouTube Next’, a team of experts who are setting out to “supercharge creator development and accelerate partner growth and success”.

Next New Networks built a highly effective Web programming platform that has served up more than two billion videos and attracted six million subscribers, according to Tom Pickett, director of a newly created YouTube Next team.

“Next New Networks will be a laboratory for experimentation and innovation with the team working in a hands-on way with a wide variety of content partners and emerging talent to help them succeed on YouTube,” Pickett said.

“At YouTube, we’re focused on building a great technology platform for creators, and so we leave the actual creation of great videos to the people who do it best: our partners.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and YouTube stressed that it was not getting into the content creation business.

YouTube has been working to expand its video offerings with more original content as online video services such as Hulu and Netflix become increasingly popular with viewers.

Google, YouTube’s parent company, has been making YouTube-related acquisitions since 2008. Such acquisitions include annotations tool Omnisio, online video platform Episodic in April of last year, and sentiment analysis and recommendation engine Fflick just last month. Next New Networks is a big move in turning YouTube into an original content creator of its own.

Author | Mich Atagana

Mich started out life wanting to be a theoretical physicist but soon realized that mathematics was required. So, she promptly let go of that dream. She then decided that law might be the best place for her talents, but with too many litigation classes missed in favour of feminist... More